Brit

I am having a wedding with 54 guests for a total of 4 hours including the ceremony. The dinner at the reception is buffet style. There will be 4 staff members working. The total costs for the wedding package (including photography, bartender, cake, catering, and facility) is just under $5,000. How much do I tip the staff???

Should I calculate based on a percent of the catering cost or what? Help!

I am picking wines for my wedding reception this December so I would like to keep it around $10 per bottle. I normally like my wines very dry, but I have already picked a dry sparkling white. I need your recommendations for something white, still, and semi sweet to semi dry. I have never had a moscato that I actually liked, but if you know of a good one I am open to try it. I like rieslings if they aren't too sweet.

I am open to red suggestions too. I haven't picked reds yet, but my reception is a BYOB place so my parents have volunteered to buy the reds so I was going to let them have final say since they are stuck with the left overs.

Thanks in advance!

I am getting married this December. For my colors I am going to have pale blue and maybe silver or champagne. What kind of flowers do you think I should have in my bouquet and maid of honor's bouquet? I am short on ideas and I don't really have a favorite flower. Help!

I am planning to have a beach wedding in south Georgia. The wedding ceremony is restricted to 20 guests. This is for the beach permit in the area and there is nothing I can do to increase this number. It's enough to cover immediate family and a couple of friends. It's a pretty cool package. They even provide you a cake, lemonade and a champagne toast, but you can't have a reception on the beach so after the ceremony, I am planning to rent a large beach house and have a low country boil or something as a "reception". No DJ or anything, just basically cooking out with our family and close friends.

If you were me, would you send additional invites to friends to come to the cook out/ reception part, or would you just keep it small and then maybe throw a seperate party for friends once we get back home. It would be about a 4 hour drive to the coast for my friends. They would have to get a hotel room and basically make a little vacation out of it, but I suppose that is always the case with weddings unless they are local.

I want to get married on Saturday, December 21st of this year. I will probably send out less than 70 invitations and with the timing of this and my family being so spread out I only anticipate about 40 guests. I want to have a ceremony at the historic courthouse in my city and follow it up with some sort of a cocktail hour where we have drinks, hor d'ourves, and cake. I don't want to have a DJ or a dance. What do you guys think of this? Have you been to a wedding like this and if so how long did it last? The weddings I have been to always have a 4 hour or longer reception at the end with dancing and a seated dinner. I don't want to do all that. What time of day do you think I should do this since I'm not feeding people a full out dinner?

I felt it for a few seconds in the back of my mouth as I was swallowing and then it disappeared. Am I going to be ok?

One of my close friends who is also my work collegue has invited me to a cocktail party this weekend. I think it is going to be a pretty formal event based on my prior experience at her parties, the invitation, and the guest list. I have already RSVP'd and asked if I can bring my brother as my plus one. She did give me a plus one on the invitation. She said she is excited for my brother and I to come and to make sure he dresses appropriately, so my question is...

What the heck do men typically wear to a party like this? I will be wearing a black and white cocktail dress and heels. Probably a jacket also, since it is December and all.

Also, the time on the invite says 6pm to 10pm. What time should I arrive and leave? I don't want to stay the full time, but I don't want to be rude. I just feel a bit awkward at parties like this. If I arrive at 6:30 and leave at 9pm do you think that is ok? Any other suggestions? I will bring a hostess gift, of course. Any suggestions for that? Thanks.

I have a bag of jalapenos. I needed one for a soup I made last night and I had to get a whole bag so I was thinking jalapeno poppers. I also have half a block of the white queso velveeta. Should I make poppers out of this? Should I go to the store and get cream cheese and bacon or just use the velveeta? What should I make to go with it? I'm just cooking for myself tonight so I don't want to make a 4 course meal or anything.

I have never had a dog before. She is a lab/chow/german shepard/doberman mix. She is under 20 pounds and she will be 12 weeks old this weekend. I have had her for 4 days so far. She has a crate and she is sleeping in her crate through the night already. I take her outside the house every morning as soon as I wake up before work. I have also been coming home mid-day to take her out. Then I take her out as soon as I get home and then one more time before bed. When she poops or pees in my house I tell her "NO" and show her the puddle/pile of poop and I let her know with my tone of voice that this is bad. When she poops or pees when I take her outside I tell her she is a good girl and try to get across the point that I like it when she does her business outside the house.

It's just frustrating because she doesn't seem to get the concept that I don't want her to poop/pee all over my house and that when we go outside the point is for her to do these things outside. I have to wake up 30 minutes earlier than normal because for the first 20 min or so we are out there she usually just runs around me in circles and tries to eat little pieces of landscaping bark.

Is there anything more I can do? When she is out of her crate I keep her on the main level of the house because it is all hardwood. I don't want her to ruin my carpet upstairs. She is very good about not going to the bathroom in her crate or anywhere she is sleeping or playing. She will just run under a table or in a corner and do it. She does it right in front of me so I guess she doesn't understand I don't like this yet.

They live over an hour away. I want to make something that just needs to be reheated. It needs to be a vegetable other than any kind of potato or corn. My family is very bad about only eating starchy vegetables so I kind of want to show up with something green.

When you attend a bridal shower and bring a gift do you also show up at the wedding with another gift? Do you consider the gift you bring to the shower a shower gift separate from the wedding gift? I don't think this is correct but my mother is trying to tell me that is how people used to do it and my friend is also confused about it.

About a month ago I started getting a lot of spam calls all at once and a very mysterious charge for $9.99 appeared on my t-mobile phone bill. I called t-mobile and asked what the heck this charge was for. It just said something like "premium services" on my bill. The customer service rep said it was a charge from a third party app and it must have been something I downloaded like ringtones, wallpaper, etc. He couldn't tell me what the purchase even was specifically. I said there is no way I downloaded something like that, not on purpose and I have gone through my phone looking for apps or other things I could have accidentally purchased. I definatly have NOTHING to show for this charge. The rep said he would blacklist the name of the company from putting charges on my bill and try to get me a refund.

Unrelated to that I also canceled my t-mobile contract. I have been wanting out for a long time and this was just the last little annoyance to motivate me. I have ordered a boost mobile phone which will be a no contract pre-paid phone.

I guess my question is, by keeping this phone number am I in danger of continuing to get bogus charges on my bill, or now that I am getting a pre paid boost phone do you think this will take care of the problem?

I can deal with the spam callers. I can't put up with a $10 charge for no apparent reason and I feel like t-mobile allowed some scammer to steal my money seeing as I have paid this bill and waiting to see about my refund. I was told it takes about a month. What bs. I won't hold my breath.

I hate this book. It's boring and I want to stop reading it. So, what happens? I have read to the point where Jack gets fired. Ana gets Jack's old job. Christian goes "missing" for 5 minutes and shows up again and Ana says yes to Christian's proposal. I am going to tear my eyes out if I read the rest of this horrifyingly boring book. You may also suggest other things I can read that will cleanse my mind of this trash. Thank you.

What is a reasonable hourly rate?

I'm not a big tea drinker but I'm trying to reduce calories and I tend to put a ton of milk in my coffee. Which brands or types are good? I typically hate tea because well, it sucks.

This past weekend my friend did something awful to me that caused me to cuss her out on her voice mail and then block her number and block her on facebook. I will never talk to her again. We had been friends since July of last year, so not that long. Leading up to this incident she was always incredibly rude and obnoxious toward servers and bartenders in almost every bar or restaurant she set foot in. She would often leave no tip because of little things like they took a minute to long to come check on us or they didn't give us ketchup until she asked or other small things. I was often embarassed to be associated with her when she was like this. If you had a friend like this would you cut ties with them or stop hanging out with them based on this behavior alone? I always thought this made her the worst kind of person and it will be a major red flag for me going forward.

I bought a very green bunch of bananas almost 2 weeks ago at Trader Joes. They have been sitting around on my counter since and are still very very green somehow. I have never experienced this before. Usually I get a bunch that is only slightly green and I have about a 3 day window to eat them before they are overly ripe for my taste. What should I do? I'm almost afraid they will rot before they turn yellow.

I had one last night where I ate two sandwiches. One was turkey and swiss on rye bread. It also had lettuce, tomato, red onion slice, and some fat free mayo. The other was bologna and peanut butter on white bread. Then I ate like half a jar of nutella which I don't even like that much in real life. I felt incredibly guilty in the dream and then when I woke up it was a huge relief I didn't eat all of that. It was just like when you dream cheat on your boyfriend or something. Has anyone else done this? I still feel weird about it.

I would like to have corned beef and taters ready for lunch time right around noon on Saturday. I usually cook this for 8 hours and I don't want to get up at 4 in the morning to put it on. Do you think it will be ok if I set my crockpot to low for 8-10 hours at midnight Friday night? It will automatically shut off after 10 hours. I just don't want to over cook it and ruin it. I think it must be kind of difficult to overcook something like this but once at a house party I turned on a pot of shredded chicken taco dip and then went to bed without shutting it off. Found it late the next morning and it was dried out and badly burned. That was in a pot that was not programmed to shut off so it was probably on low for like 12-14 hours. What should I do? Should I just woman up and set an alarm for 4am?

I have never done my taxes this late. I am using TurboTax. Absolutly everything has been entered except for the pathetic amount of interest my stupid checking account made in 2011, which I believe is a 1099 form. TurboTax remembers what this amount was last year. Should I just enter the same number or maybe make one up? Should I call Suntrust and give them hell? I seriously don't know what to do. I have gone through everything looking for this stupid piece of paper. What if it's lost?